So many postmodern theologians are busy retrieving “negative theology,” while others label such retrievals “misconstruals,” that observers might be tempted to conclude that there was, or is, such a single thing as “negative theology.” Yet anyone seeking a definition or even sampling relevant texts encounters a diverse array of premodern apophatic authors with a multiplicity of negative theologies. I here survey some of the diverse strands of Christian negative theology and argue in favor of one strand of that tradition in relation to Christ, the incarnation, and the cross.

It is certainly unusual for an Old Testament scholar to write on a New Testament subject. The reader may want to repeat the German proverb “Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten.” But if we agree that the two Testaments should not be separated — and this is the Church's accepted doctrine since the days of Marcion — then we have to give evidence for the character of the relation between the two. As an example of this question I want to trace the transition of the concept of the Temple from the Old Testament to the New.

“In art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels in the open air. Such a practice would have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece. … The festivals of the Thyiads were mainly confined to Parnassus.” Thus Sandys in the introduction to his justly admired edition of the Bacchae. Diodorus, on the other hand, tells us (4.3) that “In many Greek states congregations (βακχεῖα) of women assemble every second year, and the unmarried girls are allowed to carry the thyrsus and share the transports of the elders (συνενθουσιάζειν).” And since Sandys' day inscriptional evidence from various parts of the Greek world has confirmed Diodorus' statement. We know now that such biennial festivals (τριετηρíδες) existed at Thebes, Opus, Melos, Pergamum, Priene, Rhodes; and they are attested for Alea in Arcadia by Pausanias, for Mitylene by Aelian, for Crete by Firmicus Maternus. Their character may have varied a good deal from place to place, but we can hardly doubt that they normally included women's ὄργια of the ecstatic or quasi-ecstatic type described by Diodorus, and that these often, if not always, involved nocturnal ὀρειβασíα or mountain dancing.

The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities. Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological. In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.” The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, namely, an inordinate fixation on bodily pain and suffering. Interpreting these authors' textual emphasis on pain as merely a reflection of the pathology of aberrant individuals of the early empire is an unfair simplification of the texts. Such a reading prevents the recognition that their emphasis on pain and suffering reflects a widespread cultural concern of the period that used representations of bodily pain and suffering to construct a new subjectivity of the human person.

This list of treatises on preaching begins with the year 1500 and extends to the present time. It is thus a sequel to Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Hand-List (Ithaca, New York 1934) and Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Supplementary Hand-List (Ithaca 1936) by Harry Caplan, and to Artes Praedicandi (Paris-Ottawa 1936) by Th.-M. Charland, wherein are listed manuscripts and printed editions of tractates composed in the Middle Ages. The present list of printed books (which contains also a few manuscripts) includes as many titles as the compilers have been able to collect over a period of several years. We have, where possible, examined the books themselves, but in many instances direct observation was not feasible, and we have naturally relied on a wide variety of bibliographical sources. In making our list public we are acceding to requests made by a number of students of the doctrine and history of rhetoric and homiletics, and we hope that it may, with all its deficiencies, prove useful to investigators in these fields. We intend to follow this list of Latin treatises with like lists of treatises written in other languages of Europe.

It is difficult in our day to understand the appeal of late medieval nominalism for it seems almost schizophrenic in the way it alternates between opposing emphases. It looked at every theological problem from two radically different points of view: from the perspective of God's absolute power, and from the viewpoint of what he has in fact ordained. In the first context, nominalism relied completely on the power of philosophy and logic to define (though not to prove) omnipotence, and insisted on the radically individualistic isolation of man before a God of absolute and arbitrary power; but in the second context, these emphases are in effect reversed and stress is laid on fideism, the community and its authority, and, in the case of many nominalists, on the moral autonomy of man vis à vis God. Furthermore, the reconciliation of these contrary tendencies is primarily logical, or even verbal. Yet nominalism so captivated the minds of many theologians that they were quite content with what seems to us a purely external and artificial unity and consistency.

There has been no lack of attention focused on the deity El in the Ugaritic texts. In addition to various articles that have dealt with the characteristics and functions of this deity two excellent monographs have appeared by Marvin Pope and Otto Eissfeldt. The thrust of most of the literature pertaining to this deity has been the assumption that while El is father of the gods and the “executive” deity of the pantheon at Ugarit, he is essentially an otiose deity, whose power seems rather limited when compared to that of other deities, whose fear of other gods is obvious, and whose gradual decline in the face of Baal's rise to prominence seems clear.

An expedition under the writer's archaeological direction and sponsored by Drew University, McCormick Theological Seminary and the American Schools of Oriental Research completed its fourth season of excavation at Tell Balâtah, the ancient Shechem, in 1962. The site lies at the eastern opening between Mts. Ebal and Gerizim, forty-one miles north of Jerusalem. The earlier Sellin expedition had reported two strata of Hellenistic settlement at the site, though the date and extent of the occupation were not clarified. The Drew-McCormick Expedition has been particularly concerned with the Hellenistic occupation for two reasons: (1) The opportunity to clarify an obscure age in the cultural history of Palestine and especially to develop a ceramic typology, with chronologically fixed points, so that a more precise means of dating may be available for the archaeology of the period; (2) the problem of the historical meaning of the Hellenistic ruins at Shechem.

A l'occasion d'une arétalogie de Karpokrate, qu'il publie, M. R. Harder a été induit à reprendre le problème des arétalogies isiaques, connues, comme on sait, par cinq documents du même type. M. Harder pense que tous ces textes remontent à un original égyptien (H) traduit en grec. Un exemplaire de cette traduction, gravé à Memphis dans le temple de Ptah (M), est la source de Kymé (K), Ios (J), Salonique (S) et du texte en prose qui a servi de modèle au poème d'Andros (Ap). Un exemplaire du texte égyptien, gravé dans la fabuleuse Nysa d'Arabie, c'est dire en une ville inconnue, serait, une fois traduit, la source de Diodore (D). D'après l'inscription de Kymé, la plus complète, M. Harder reconstitue cette source commune de MD. On aurait là, pense-t-il, un écrit qui se révèle égyptien, non seulement par les idées, étrangères à l'esprit grec, mais aussi par le désordre de la composition, trait proprement égyptien. D'un mot ce document aurait été forgé par les prêtres d'Egypte pour exalter auprès des Grecs le culte d'Isis, que l'on présente surtout comme une bienfaitrice de l'humanité. La tendance serait “pro-égyptienne,” et il y aurait lieu de comparer l'ouvrage d'Hécatée d'Abdère, sorte de programme de gouvernement rédigé du point de vue de l'Egypte et adressé à Ptolémée Soter pour lui recommander d'être un Bienfaiteur, à l'exemple des dieux égyptiens (Isis et Osiris) et des pharaons.

Calendars, liturgy, and especially festivals offer a convenient vantage point from which to analyze collective identities. They can provide access to group mentalities rather than to the ideas of individual intellectuals, which are often more or less confined to ivory towers.1 Ritual addresses the whole human being—the intellect, emotions, and body—and it does so by establishing and defining relations between the individual, his or her in-group, and the out-group.2 Every collective identity is formed and reformed in a continuous process encompassing exchange with, as well as distinction from, other possible collective identities.3 Sometimes, this construction of a “we” in distinction from “them” is explicit, while at other times it takes place in a more clandestine and encrypted fashion.

A script is merely an artifact until a performer brings it to life; a text is a starting point, despite the fact that its finality suggests a destination. With works that were meant to be performed in some fashion (however generously understood “performance” may be), the dynamic relationship between performer and audience shapes and even defines their reception; such works, fully expressed, are visual, auditory, and kinetic. The written word may mediate this relationship, shaping the arc of the narrative and the words of the characters, but it is performance that gives the narrative life and the characters voices and bodies.

A relationship between Achilles Tatius and Christianity has been imagined from at least as early as the tenth century when the Suda claimed that he had converted to Christianity and been ordained as a bishop. Modern scholarship has found this highly improbable; nevertheless, attempts to explore connections between his late second-century c.e. novel, Leucippe and Clitophon, and early Christianity continue. In recent decades, within a context of renewed interest in the ancient novel, scholars of early Christianity have found a wealth of material in the novels to illuminate the generic development and meaning of Christian narratives in the New Testament and beyond. Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which the novels respond to and incorporate themes from Christianity. Achilles Tatius's etiological myth of wine and its associated harvest festival in Leuc. Clit. 2.2 represent a particularly striking point of contact between Christianity and the Greek novel. In the first section below, I systematically review the narrative and ritual parallels between Leuc. Clit. 2.2 and the Christian Eucharist and conclude that they are too striking to be accidental or to have gone unnoticed by an ancient reader with knowledge of Christianity. Although these similarities have been pointed out, their meaning and consequences have received comparatively little attention from scholars either of the novel or of early Christianity. Thus, in the subsequent sections of this study I contextualize these parallels within second-century Christian and non-Christian literary and religious culture. My contention is that an exploration of the relationship between Leuc. Clit. 2.2 and the Christian Eucharist will provide valuable insight both into the larger project of Achilles Tatius and into the relationship between early Christianity and its contemporary context, particularly the Second Sophistic.

The commonly accepted idea of the evolution of the Delphian mantic may be outlined thus: There was first an oracle of the Mother Earth, working by incubation (cf. p. 16, later). Later on, Apollo took possession of it, but its character remained unchanged: the believers continued to receive revelation in dreams. Afterwards Dionysos went to Delphi and with him ecstasy entered into the cult. It was not until then that oracles were given by an inspired, i.e. ecstatic, priestess called Pythia.

In the eye of a protracted political storm, the rabbinic sages of the first centuries of the common era preserved and nurtured their Jewish heritage. This was not a univocal heritage, but one of significant diversity. Although these rabbis were fully aware of the divisiveness that had plagued Jewish religious attitudes over the centuries, they turned debate and dissent into their very trademark. Whether in matters legal, ethical, or theological, differing and even contradictory opinions were the norm. A natural result of this rabbinic posture is that the entire rabbinic corpus is anthological. We do not possess individual works of the rabbis, great as they might have been. We have instead catenae or collections of statements. Sometimes they represent real conversations between sages, but other times they reflect an editorial juxtaposition of opposing views. These characteristics of rabbinic literature create a formidable challenge for those who wish to treat rabbinic thought systematically.

To the men and women of the Middle Ages the figure of Constantine loomed large over the fourth century. Born a pagan, he converted to Christianity and became the first Christian emperor, the convenor of councils, the defender of orthodoxy, the builder of churches, the herald of a new age, the founder of Christian Europe. But to the men and women of the later fourth century, the generation of John Chrysostom, it was not Constantine, but Julian, raised a Christian only to forsake his “hereditary piety,” Julian the pagan emperor, Julianus Apostata, whose deeds were alive in their memory. The age of Constantine was part of past history, but Julian's actions, abortive as they may have appeared to later generations, were still remembered not only by the old, says John Chrysostom, but also by the “young people” of our day.

The problem of Philo's Exposition of the Law and of its relation to the treatise De vita Mosis has, it seems to me, not yet been solved.

The Exposition is one of Philo's three great series of commentaries on the Pentateuch. It comprised originally De opificio mundi, De Abrahamo, De Isaaco, De Iacobo, De Josepho, De decalogo, De specialibus legibus, De virtutibus, and De praemiis et poenis, of which all are preserved but De Isaaco and De Iacobo.

In 1964, the Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus, which until that time had listed together works treating Colossians and Philemon, provided Colossians with its own heading and introduced a new rubric: “Philemon; Slavery in the NT.” So firmly established is the interpretation of the epistle as a “cover letter” addressed to the master of a repentant runaway slave that any discussion of slavery in the New Testament invariably alludes to Paul's Epistle to Philemon; all recent commentators on the epistle include in their treatments at least a brief disquisition or excursus on ancient slavery. Even in his methodologically sophisticated study of the “narrative world” of Philemon, Norman Petersen began his summary of the “story” behind the letter as follows: “Once upon a time there was a runaway slave named Onesimus.…” Furthermore, the epistle is universally construed as a delicate and canny intervention on the part of the apostle Paul into the problematic of Christian relations under the Roman slave regime, despite the concession on the part of modern exegetes that Philemon fails to elucidate Paul's attitudes toward either slaves in particular or the institution of slavery in general.

These words in criticism of Fra Lippo's vivid and realistic painting of sacred subjects admirably typify the attitude of theology to art. In the ages when the masses were still unable to read, the church took advantage of the work of the painter to impart instruction in the Bible stories. But after all, mere enlightenment is comparatively useless, sometimes even dangerous. It is always inferior to devotion. As long as the masses could be inspired by art to perform more fully their religious duties, so long was art rendering to the church the services that were its due. If the actual facts, even as recorded in the Scriptures, stood in the way of the theological object, they had to be neglected, obscured, or denied. If by a false depiction religious feeling were aroused, there could be no doubt as to the value of such depiction.